By offering a symmetric version of its technology, F5 claims to offer a 200- to 1000-percent performance boost for Web applications, which could be critical for firms with operations on both sides of the Atlantic, according to Hicks. "Delays can be up to 40 seconds for applications such as Sharepoint, Siebel or SAP portal."
BIG-IP is aimed at Web traffic, whereas vendors such as Riverbed and Blue Coat focus on storage networking protocols such as CIFS and NFS, Hicks observes.
Riverbed and Blue Coat also handle HTTP traffic in addition to the likes of CIFS and NFS, underlining the current shift toward WAN optimization and Web acceleration combos.
In the networking arena, F5 offers its symmetric WANJet product for CIFS data, but it seems likely that this technology will converge with BIG-IP. (See F5 Intros WANJet and Swan Labs, Enterweb Team Up.) Hicks would not reveal any roadmap specifics to Byte and Switch, but it seems clear that, by adding symmetric capabilities to BIG-IP, the vendor will eventually provide support for both CIFS and Web traffic on a single platform. "We're looking to give customers freedom of choice," says Hicks, somewhat vaguely.
But Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) analyst Jon Oltsik feels that F5's intentions are clear. "The goal is to move this beyond Web traffic and get much more protocol specific," he says. "The more knowledgeable the box is, the more valuable it is."
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